Robert Jensen is someone I respect for his integrity, courage, and refusal to turn away when seeing the deeper realities within ourselves, our nation, our world is painful, frightening, and dark. He and other courageous truth-tellers illuminate the dark truths about America. And us. Yet, I do believe that change is possible. Possible to the degree that each and every one of us join Robert and all those whose amazing courage and integrity remind us that it is possible to not turn away, to look and see the depths of what is, to own and grieve what we find there, and to commit to doing our part in changing the way it has always been. Then there is a freeing for new possibilities, for new healing, for new changes and awakenings that had never been possible before.
There are so many different faces of white supremacy that have spanned our history and continue to manifest very much so in present times. Each and every one of us is affected, and often unknowingly infected, with this toxicity. My prayer, always, is for courage and truth and healing. Because, as given voice to in this article, there has been and continues to be such profound cost of our great forgetting, of our ignorance and denial, of our fear and hate, of our sense of separation into us versus them rather than the experience of connectedness as one planetary family. My eyes and heart are increasingly open. I fully acknowledge how bleak things often appear and how crushing the suffering is for millions in America and for billions worldwide.
At the same time, there are also many reminders of a different world, of possibility, of hope, of more and more waking up and passionately working to create a world which increasingly works for all. Side by side with all the horrors of chronic subtle and overt violence and oppression, there are also the beautiful faces of children, of love, of healing, of consciousness and awakening and remembrance of the true essence of beauty that resides in each and every one of us.
May we all grow in our capacity to remember what we have forgotten and to see and experience the Sacred in all. Another world is possible! It is up to us.
Peace & blessings ~ Molly
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| May our beliefs and values, integrity and consciousness, actions and authenticity, courage and caring, compassion and love increasingly send ripples which bless all the children everywhere. |
Can The United States Transcend White Supremacy?
Facing what seems like an endless stream of news about racialized conflicts and violence, many people call for us to get beyond our history and find solutions for today, concrete actions we can take immediately, ways of expressing love right now to help us cope with the pain.
This yearning is understandable, but it’s just as important that we grapple with history, realize the inadequacy of any actions we might take today, and accept the limits of love in the face of political and economic realities. Better that we start with a harsh, but honest, assessment: The United States has always been, and likely always will be, a white-supremacist country.
Start by (1) remembering that the United States is the wealthiest and most powerful country in the history of the world and (2) realizing that this wealth and power has depended on the idea of white supremacy. Recognize that the material comfort of the United States is the product of three racialized holocausts, rationalized by white supremacy.
Acquiring the land base of the United States required the most extensive genocide in recorded human history, the campaign to remove indigenous people and allow Europeans and their descendants to claim ownership of, and exploit, the land and its resources. This process killed millions and destroyed entire societies.
The United States in the 19th century was propelled into the industrial era in large part on the back of cheap cotton, which provided the raw material for the mills of the northeast and crucial hard currency from exports to Europe. This was not the product of free-market economics but the Atlantic slave trade, a process that killed millions and destroyed entire societies.
The United States in the 20th century eventually became the global power, through the use of overt military aggression, covert operations, and violence by proxies to maintain a world order hospitable to U.S. economic interests. From “our backyard” in Central America to southern Africa through the Middle East and Asia, U.S. policy drove toward dominance, a process that was easier to sell to the public because the millions killed and the societies destroyed were almost all non-white.
In all these endeavors, Europeans and their descendants did not dominate and exterminate because they hated non-white peoples but out of desire for wealth and power. The ideology of white supremacy developed to justify the domination and extermination of other human beings. Europeans have a long history of violence toward each other as well, but the conquest of non-white peoples throughout the world produced the distinctive pathology of white supremacy.
Because the wealth and power of the United States are so deeply rooted in white supremacy, the abandonment of that pathology would inevitably lead to difficult questions about the country’s moral and material obligations to non-white people, at home and abroad. If poor and working-class white people were to say, “But wait, I haven’t been able to cash in on much of this wealth,” that would inevitably lead to questions about the pathology of capitalism. If women were to say, “But wait, no matter what the race and class hierarchies, we still face endemic violence and denigration,” that would inevitably lead to questions about the pathology of patriarchy.
All systems of illegitimate authority that give some people unearned wealth and power are based on a similar pathology that tries to naturalize hierarchy and exploitation. Pull on one string, and the fabric of rationalizations for all systems of domination/subordination start to unravel.
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